Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Of course, I was coming to that,’ said Charles. He jumped down from Collis’s trunk, tugged his vest straight, and stood beside him, at least six inches shorter, but straight-backed and perky, and looking as if he would gladly smack any man in the mouth as soon as say good morning.

  ‘You can stay where I stay, whenever I’m in town,’ he said. ‘It’s a fine hotel of sorts, and I’m friendly with the proprietor. Well, in actual fact, it’s a whorehouse on Dupont Street, but they have five or six rooms that a visiting gentleman can use, and besides gambling they have some of the prettiest girls in the city. My wife thinks I stay at the Rassette House, which is more or less respectable as San Francisco goes, but they can’t cook you an omelette that’s good for anything else but patching your boots, and all their chambermaids are as ugly as paddle steamers. You’re best off with Knickerbocker Jane, and that’s experience talking.’

  ‘Knickerbocker Jane?’ asked Collis.

  ‘You’ll love her.’ Charles grinned. ‘Hold on a moment, and I’ll have my carriage whistled up. Billy! Get the carriage around here, will you? Oh yes, Knickerbocker Jane is somebody special. She’ll like you, too. She’s fond of classy accents. They call her Knickerbocker because there was a fire at her place one day, and the fire company which came around to douse it was the Knickerbocker Number Five volunteer company. Jane rewarded each and every one of those firemen personally, and you know what I mean by that. Look now, here’s the carriage now.’

  Edging slowly through the wharfside crowd came a slightly shabby phaeton driven by a tall Negro in a cockeyed silk hat. It was reined up alongside, and the Negro climbed down, picked up Collis’s trunk as if it weighed nothing at all, and slung it into the back. Then he bowed, gave an exaggerated grin, and opened the door for Collis to step aboard.

  ‘This is Billy,’ said Charles, by way of explanation. ‘Billy will take you round to Knickerbocker Jane’s, Collis. You tell her that Charlie Tucker sent you, and say you’d like a room for a week. Get yourself some victuals, and sleep off your journey, and I’ll bring Andy Hunt around at seven, and we’ll all step out for dinner at the International.’

  *

  It wasn’t too far to Knickerbocker Jane’s, but the streets were so clamorous and crowded that it took almost twenty minutes for Billy to nudge and push his horses as far as the junction of Dupont and Pine. Collis, sitting back on the sun-cracked leather of the phaeton’s seats, was amazed by the rowdiness and the music and the boisterous laughter that went on all around him. The whole population of San Francisco seemed to be infected with the need to rush around at random from morning till night, only stopping for meals and beer.

  At first, as they made their way along Broadway through the dock area, and the district he later learned to call Sydney Town, Collis was afraid that San Francisco might turn out to be even rougher than he had first imagined. Many of the buildings were not much more than shanties, or beached and abandoned ships that had been incongruously converted into warehouses, or hotels. Every other doorway proclaimed itself a saloon, with wooden signs reading ‘Steam’ or ‘XX Stout’, and a clientele inside who kept their hats on and their suspenders adjusted tight, and who spent all day arguing each other hoarse. There were plank boardwalks along the streets, but if they weren’t crowded with people, they were obstructed by makeshift tents or lean-tos, in which you could gamble away six months of laborious gold-panning in an hour and a half, or have your hair cropped by an Italian barber and then glossed up with Taylor’s Brilliantine, or even a tooth pulled.

  The buildings that weren’t saloons were dance halls, lunchrooms, dilapidated boarding houses, shipping offices, or gambling dens. The whole street was thronged with longshoremen and sailors, and Chinese carrying huge bundles of laundry and cumbersome boxes, and the air was vibrant with the strumming of guitars and the steady thunder of boot-heels on the boardwalk. Miners and drifters and casual gamblers sat in the sun, their black coats dusty and their necks red, drinking whisky and flipping cards on to upended barrels. And above it all, like the warbling of doves in a dovecot, the prostitutes called out sweet obscenities from their upstairs windows.

  Further south, however, the buildings began to improve, and soon they were passing iron-frame hotels, red-brick banks, French restaurants, and fashionable drapery stores. Collis saw elegant ladies with parasols and gentlemen who were nobbily dressed even by New York standards. But the sidewalks were still teeming, and the street was a jingling clattering turmoil of carriages and wagons and horse-drawn omnibuses, and there was a bustling and buzzing of activity that would have made any Manhattan socialite feel quite ready to lie down after an hour, with a cold compress.

  They were held up on the corner of Portsmouth Square by a jam of delivery wagons, which seemed to involve a great deal of shouting and picturesque cursing. Then they had to wait at Sacramento Street while a Chinese funeral went by, with tinkling cymbals, and a coffin the size of a small brigantine.

  The speed of their progress wasn’t much helped by an impassive-looking Chilean, either, who had chosen lunchtime to drive a herd of fifty or sixty oxen down towards the docks. Collis and Billy were trapped at Dupont and California for almost five minutes while the lowing, shambling, flybitten cattle went past.

  At last, dusty and sweating, they drew up outside a three-storey building on Dupont Street, freshly painted a smart bottle green, with gold trim and two polished coach lamps outside the door. It was the best-kept building along the whole street, and it was sandwiched, both conveniently and respectably, between the surgery of Dr W. Carr and the offices of the Charitable Institute for Women. Opposite, their hats pulled over their eyes against the glare of the midday sun, a group of loafers sat at outdoor tables, drinking and playing cards and smoking pipes. They watched Collis with curiosity as he climbed out of the phaeton and crossed the boardwalk to ring at Knickerbocker Jane’s bell. Billy swung Collis’s trunk down and set it down on the ground.

  ‘Looks a pretty trim place,’ said Collis conversationally.

  Billy, leaning on the trunk, simply raised an eyebrow.

  The door remained closed, so Collis rang again. By now, the loafers across the street were regarding him fixedly, their hands of cards unplayed, their pipes clenched between their teeth, and even one or two passers-by turned to stare at Collis with unabashed interest. Whatever they did in San Francisco, they certainly didn’t mind their own business.

  ‘It doesn’t seem they’re answering,’ Collis remarked uncomfortably.

  ‘Maybe they all in bed,’ said Billy.

  ‘In bed? It’s only lunchtime. It’s the middle of the working day.’

  ‘That’s why they all in bed.’ Billy cackled.

  Collis rang for a third time, and quite abruptly the front door was opened, and a tall handsome woman with Titian hair tied up in black ribbons came stepping out on to the boardwalk. Her teeth were crooked, but in her lowcut black satin gown, which displayed a healthy acreage of soft and freckled bosom, you wouldn’t have noticed, or even if you noticed, you wouldn’t have minded. The loafers across the street all began to cheer and whistle and stamp their feet, and Collis found himself heatedly embarrassed.

  ‘Hallo, Billy,’ said the woman coolly to the coachman, and then she turned her green-eyed gaze on to Collis, her fingers playing absent-mindedly with the diamonds at her neck. She reminded Collis of the type of woman who would lustily introduce inexperienced boys into the arts and crafts of lovemaking, all low cooing cries of encouragement and white wobbling thighs.

  The woman gave Collis an almost imperceptible curtsy. ‘You must be a friend of Charles’s,’ she said, showing her crooked teeth in a smile. ‘Well, any friend of Charles’s is welcome here. Particularly such a gentlemanly one. We do have to cater to all sorts, you know, and it’s pleasant sometimes to have a little style.’

  ‘My name’s Collis Edmonds, ma’am, out of New York,’ said Collis. ‘Mr Tucker suggested I might be able to stay here for a few days. If that’s convenient, of co
urse.’

  He gave the woman one of his melting, hurt-looking smiles, and he knew damned well it was going to be convenient. It was probably such a rarity for her and her girls to have a properly dressed gentleman ringing at their door that they would have taken him in for his collar studs alone. She lifted her hand to be kissed and said, ‘I’m Jane Spalding. Most people call me Knickerbocker Jane. Why don’t you come on in? You look as if you could use a drink, and maybe some light luncheon.’

  Knickerbocker Jane led the way into the house. The hallway set the tone for the whole building, and was probably the most elaborate and overdecorated hallway that Collis had ever come across in his life. The walls were hung with dark red watered silk, and clustered with gilded mirrors and silhouettes and atrocious oil paintings of sad-eyed Spanish women moping in weed-grown gardens. There were clocks, and whatnots crammed with cheap pottery ornaments, and Chinese vases filled with plumes of pampas grass, and cases of moths and butterflies. Above the doorway that led into the living-room was a polished brass plaque from the Knickerbocker Five Volunteer Fire Company, and underneath it the inscription Exegi monumentum aere perennius.

  Billy carried in Collis’s trunk, and Knickerbocker Jane gave him an indulgent smile and said, ‘Take it up to the third landing, will you, Billy? I’ll have Henrietta pour a beer for you in the kitchen afterwards. Mr Edmonds, Collis, would you care to come this way?’

  Collis handed Billy fifty cents for his time and his trouble. He was slightly offended when Billy bit both coins to see if they were sound before tucking them into his vest pocket. But Billy grinned at him and said, ‘Don’t trust nothing and nobody in this city, Mr Edmonds, not even yourself.’

  Collis looked at him. ‘What about Mr Tucker?’ he asked.

  Billy grinned even wider. ‘Oh, you can trust Mr Tucker okay. You can trust Mr Tucker to skin a cat alive and sell the poor creature its own fur back as the latest style from France. That’s what you can trust Mr Tucker to do.’

  Collis thought about that and then said: ‘I like that. I think I’m going to enjoy myself here.’

  In the parlour, at a small table set with a white lace cloth, while Knickerbocker Jane watched him from the fastnesses of a purple plush daybed, Collis ate a light lunch of home-cured ham, California asparagus, cold potato salad, and fresh fruit. He smiled at her from time to time as he ate, and she smiled back, but they didn’t speak much. He sipped chilled wine from a long-stemmed hock glass, but he wasn’t altogether sure he liked it. It was much sweeter and mustier than anything he’d tasted in New York, and he reckoned that four or five glasses would probably give him a killing hangover.

  The parlour was pleasantly cool and shaded from the sunlight, although it was just as overfurnished as the hallway. There were heavy velvet drapes tied up with gilt cords, marble statuettes of harassed nymphs, and a carved wooden fireplace that was encrusted with daguerreotypes, decorative seashells, lamps, doilies, and knickknacks. At least there were plenty of vases of flowers around, fresh-cut and sweet, and the brightness of the afternoon after the fog of the morning made him feel far more cheerful.

  ‘Are you feeling refreshed?’ asked Knickerbocker Jane.

  He wiped his mouth with his napkin and nodded. ‘I don’t think I’ve had such a tasty meal in a month.’

  ‘You don’t like the wine, though.’

  ‘It’s – well, it’s unusual. Is it local?’

  ‘They make it up in Napa Valley. The Indians tread the grapes with their bare feet, in a trough made from cowhide, and then they ferment it in skin bags.’

  Collis held his glass rather anxiously up to the light. ‘I thought I detected an unusual ambience,’ he said politely.

  Knickerbocker Jane laughed. ‘I only served it because it’s a curiosity. We have plenty of French wine here. When you’re rested, I’ll have the girls open a bottle of champagne.’

  ‘Do you have many girls here?’ asked Collis.

  ‘Five at the moment. I used to have eight, but one was murdered about three months ago, when she was crossing the plaza after dark, and two of them just upped and left.’

  ‘Good girls must be pretty hard to find.’

  ‘Any girls are pretty hard to find. But the money’s good. A girl could come out here from the East and make herself a fortune in three years, all in gold and silver. Years ago, I used to have an Armenian girl who could tie herself up in knots. You know, a contortionist. She charged twenty dollars in gold for a session, and she left this city richer than most of the bankers and merchants and miners you could ever meet.’

  Collis got up from the table and crossed to the window. Outside, through the lace curtains, he could see a small scrubby yard, and bordering that, the backs of a row of clapboard stores and saloons. Beyond, there were the flat rooftops of the financial district and downtown San Francisco, and the naked summit of Fern Hill – a peak he would later learn to call Nob Hill. Nob Hill was too steep for a horse and carriage to reach the summit, and consequently nobody lived there.

  ‘What made you come out here?’ asked Collis. ‘You sound to me as if you came from someplace like Baltimore originally.’

  ‘Almost right.’ Jane smiled. ‘I was a Catonsville girl, to start off with. I married a sailor when I was sixteen, and I guess my mother and father thought that was good riddance. They’d never liked me. My father was a clerk in a bank, and my mother was half crazy.’

  ‘Wholly crazy, I’d say, if she didn’t like you.’

  ‘I guess that’s a compliment, but I wasn’t much of a delight in those days. I was plain as a plank of pine, and the first thing that happened was the sailor ran off and left me. He was drowned off Assawoman Island four months later, so I guess that served him right. I went home to mother and father, but we argued so much that I ran off.’

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ asked Collis.

  ‘Go ahead. There’s some good cigars in that mother-of-pearl box by the stuffed eagle.’

  Collis took out a cigar and sat down on the daybed next to his hostess. The afternoon sunlight shone in shifting patterns through the smoke, and Knickerbocker Jane’s face faded and reappeared like a memory.

  ‘I made my first dishonest buck in back of a circus tent,’ she said, ‘one rainy night in Mousie, Kentucky. He was the man who took the money for the menagerie, and he gave me eighty-two cents, which was all he had in his overalls. He was old, maybe fifty, but he was kind, too, and I guess that was what made me feel that there wasn’t any harm in that kind of work. I sold my body all the way to Omaha, Nebraska, and from Omaha I came all the way across country by wagon train, working whenever I needed to.’

  Collis rubbed his eyes. He was beginning to feel very tired.

  ‘I came here in ’47,’ Knickerbocker Jane was telling him. ‘I used to work out of the old City Hotel in those days, on the corner of Clay and Kearny. That was a stew of debauchery and no mistake. The whole place was overflowing with gold, and you could make hundreds of dollars in one night, as long as you were willing to do anything with anybody.’

  Collis looked at her wryly.

  ‘Are you shocked?’ she asked him. ‘I have to warn you I’m a plain speaker, and I’m never ashamed of anything I’ve done.’

  ‘I’m not shocked,’ he told her. ‘I’m just wondering how I’m going to compete with people like you and Charles Tucker.’

  ‘Compete? You don’t have to compete. We’re your friends.’

  ‘I know you are,’ he said. ‘You’ve proved it plainly enough. But I’m the next best thing to flat broke, and if I’m going to make myself any kind of a living, I’m going to have to compete, and do more than compete. I’m going to have to win.’

  Knickerbocker Jane straightened her black dress. ‘What’s your particular line?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing much. I gamble. But I lived off my parents until a month ago, and living off your parents doesn’t do much to sharpen your skills. I’m quite reasonable at finance, but I’m not a genius. I ride. I smoke too many cigars.
I get drunk.’

  ‘What did Charles suggest?’ asked Jane.

  ‘He suggested I start off by gambling. But from what I’ve seen this morning, it looks as though the whole population of San Francisco are whizees at gambling.’

  Knickerbocker Jane stood up. She walked across the flower-patterned rug and stopped by the far window, the window that gave out on to Kearny Street. ‘What you have to remember about San Francisco,’ she said, ‘is that everyone who lives here has given up everything they ever owned to try to make a fresh beginning. They are gamblers by nature, or they would never have come. I gambled when I came on that wagon train across the Sierras. You gambled when you came on your ship. If you want to compete and win in San Francisco you have to be prepared to lose all you’ve got. Your money, your reputation, your belongings.’

  She turned and faced him. Her bosom bulged from her tight gown. ‘Even your human dignity,’ she said.

  He slept until it was almost dark. When he woke up, he wasn’t sure where he was, and he lay there staring at the china shepherdess on his mahogany bedside table with perplexity. He could hear people talking somewhere in the street below, and the rattling of carriages and carts, but he didn’t recognise the faint aroma of perfume and cooking, and the blue flowered wallpaper was completely unfamiliar. He looked at the corner of his white embroidered pillowslip, at his sheet, and then across the room at the blue-painted door with its shiny brass knob.

  He lay there for almost five minutes. Then he sat up and looked around him. Knickerbocker Jane had given him a quiet room at the back of her house, with a white-painted brass bed, a plain mahogany bureau, a washstand, and a brass-bound sea-chest. He climbed out from between the sheets, naked, and walked across to the yellow draped window. Spread out under the setting sun, its rooftops and chimneys and idly waving flags bright with that special clarity of San Francisco evenings, its hills sand-purple in the distance, was the city to which all his bad luck and his miscalculations had at last brought him, and in which he would have to learn to live. Not just live in, but lick. Because nobody was going to pay him for anything ever again, unless he earned it, won it, or stole it.